The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer.

Loading ...

Loading ...

This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe

Respawn's next-gen shooter looks incredible.

I have yet to get hands-on time with Respawn Entertainment's upcoming shooter Titanfall.

But it's the first competitive first-person shooter that I've been excited to play in a long time, and one of the few games being demoed at recent conventions that makes me actually wish I'd attended (along with Dark Souls 2!)

To me, Call of Duty is a sort of guilty pleasure.

The single-player campaign is a guilty pleasure the same way watching a dumb action movie is.

The multiplayer is just twitchy and challenging enough to test my mettle, and it's fun to go up against much better players and find yourself improving, however slowly.

While Battlefield tends to get a lot right in its multiplayer, I still find that the close-quarters, twitchier combat in Call of Duty, is more my cup of tea.

(I enjoy Counter-Strike for the same reason, and find that between the two games I can basically get my fill of competitive online shooters.)

Titanfall looks like an evolutionary leap, so to speak. The jetpack thing isn't new---Tribes: Ascend makes use of jetpack leap-flying---but the way it's used in Titanfall looks great.

The style is very similar to Call of Duty, but the innovation is real and tangible.

It's all about parkour for me. Players move fast and fluid through each map. Double-jumps, wall-running...this stuff looks like good, gamey fun.

I often wonder why more games don't take advantage of the potential of making something as simple as movement more exciting. Games like Titanfall and EverQuest appear to believe that games ought to make use of their capacity for crazy motion and stunts. Most of us can't do parkour in real life; we might as well be able to in a video game.

I may not be the best bellwether of the shooter market, but usually the words "competitive multiplayer" don't do it for me. Titanfall is an exception to the rule.

This is speculation, of course, based on previews of the game and what little of it we've been shown, but I think it could shake up the shooter market.

Battlefield 4 and Call of Duty have been the big fish in the pond over the past few years, but this could change the equation.

And yes, Titanfall is coming to PC and Xbox 360 alongside the Xbox One, but I still think the game will be a huge selling point for 's upcoming console.

It wouldn't surprise me at all to see it launch on PS4 down the road. I doubt EA will want to pass up the opportunity a major cross-platform franchise presents for financial success and a status boost.

But between its March 2014 release and whenever that theoretically may happen, the game is an ace in the hole for Microsoft.

For those of you not interested in purchasing an Xbox One, there's always the perpetual next-gen machine to play it on: your trusty, good ol' fashioned gaming PC.

But this will be a very tight race, largely thanks to games like Titanfall. I think those of us deeply involved in video game news often forget that the bad press the Xbox One got early on will not impact many consumers and that good games forgive all past transgressions.